Letters of Evelyn Underhill

The Letters of Evelyn Underhill was edited by Charles Williams and published in 1943, two years after Underhill's death in June 1941. Williams, the poet, novelist and theologian, was a friend and a colleague at Oxford University Press, and he prepared the selection with a long introduction of his own. The book gathers the correspondence of a woman best known for her scholarly study Mysticism (1911), who in her later decades became one of the most sought-after spiritual directors in the Church of England, though she never held any official position. Her letters were the working instrument of that ministry. Written to friends, to clergy, to troubled strangers and to those she directed over many years, they answer the actual questions people brought her about prayer, doubt, dryness, work, family and the pull of the world.

The letters do not set out a system, and their power lies in what they do repeatedly. Underhill insists that the spiritual life is first of all about God and not about the soul's experiences, and she turns correspondents away from self-examination and toward adoration. She presses a robust, unsentimental realism: the life of prayer is lived amid ordinary duties, and holiness is measured by charity and steadiness rather than by consolation or ecstasy. She counsels patience with spiritual aridity, wariness of religious emotion pursued for its own sake, and a fidelity to common worship and the sacraments that keeps private devotion from becoming self-regarding. Her tone is brisk, humorous and sometimes sharply practical, the voice of a director who respects her correspondents enough to be direct. Williams's introduction frames her as a figure in whom intellectual seriousness and a plain devotional life were held together.

The collection has endured because it shows the doctrines of her better-known books worked out in particular lives, and because it models a kind of spiritual guidance that is neither pious fluff nor technical manual. Readers who find formal treatises on prayer remote often find in these pages the same teaching rendered personal and workable. The book also preserves a precise portrait of Anglican spiritual direction between the wars, practiced by a layperson and a woman at a time when that role had little official recognition.

Who should read this: those who pray, or want to, and who are tired of advice that treats the inner life as a project of self-improvement or a hunt for experience. It suits people carrying real responsibilities who need counsel that fits an ordinary week. It is not for readers looking for a systematic introduction to mysticism or a historical survey of the tradition; for that, Underhill's own Mysticism is the place to begin. Nor will it satisfy anyone wanting a single sustained argument, since it is a collection of letters and reads best slowly, a few at a time.